Public Access Design

A Fair Chance

Making Policy Public

Vendor Power!

Making Policy Public

Bottled Up

City Studies

About CUP

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to increase meaningful civic engagement particularly among underrepresented communities. CUP projects demystify the urban policy and planning issues that impact our communities, so that more individuals can better participate in shaping them.

We believe that increasing understanding of how these systems work is the first step to better and more diverse community participation.

CUP projects are collaborations of art and design professionals, community-based advocates and policymakers, and our staff. Together we take on complex issues—from the juvenile justice system to zoning law to food access—and break them down into simple, accessible, visual explanations.

The tools we create are used by organizers and educators all over New York City and beyond to help their constituents better advocate for their own community needs.

CUP takes two approaches to increasing meaningful civic engagement: youth education programs in which students work with Teaching Artists to investigate some aspect of how the city works and create final products that educate others about what they learned; and community education programs in which CUP collaborates with designers and advocates to produce tools, workshops, and publications that explain complex policies or processes for specific audiences.

Community Education

CUP works with advocacy organizations, policy experts, and designers to produce publications, workshops, and other teaching tools that explain important policy issues for the people who most need to know. CUP publications and teaching tools are made for and with specific groups in specific places, but they reach a national audience of people interested in civics education and graphic and information design.

CUP’s Envisioning Development Toolkits are interactive workshops that teach people about basic land-use terms and concepts, enabling them to participate meaningfully in neighborhood change. For example, the What Is Affordable Housing? teaches participants about income demographics and the technical definitions of affordable housing to help them understand proposed development and advocate for community needs. The toolkits are developed in close collaboration with community organizations throughout New York, such as Good Old Lower East Side, Fifth Avenue Committee, Housing Conservation Coordinators, and ANHD. Learn more here.

Through Making Policy PublicCUP collaborates with community organizations and design professionals to produce foldout posters that make complex policy issues accessible. For example, Healthy Salons For All is a five-language poster that helps nail salon workers know their health, safety, and labor rights. Collaborators have included designers like MTWTF, Candy Chang, WeShouldDoItAll, and Silas Munro with organizations such as the Urban Justice Center, the Brennan Center for Justice, Community Voices Heard, and the Pennsylvania Farmworkers Project. Learn more here.

Public Access Designprojects are print, digital, and motion graphics created through short-term collaborations of CUP staff, community organizations, and designers or animators to make complex issues accessible to the New Yorkers most affected by them. Each project results in a short video or animation, a pocket-sized foldout, a small booklet, or an interactive website. For example, Housing Court Help is pocket-sized booklet that helps tenants fight landlord harassment and eviction. Collaborators have included community organizations such as Housing Court Answers, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, and the Immigrant Defense Project, and designers such as Petra Farinha, Raj Kottamasu, and James Dunphy. Learn more here.

Through our Technical Assistance program, community organizations and advocacy groups can hire CUP to create custom outreach and organizing tools. For example, Weathering the Storm is an interactive website showing residents of coastal areas how flood insurance changes will impact their homes. Collaborators have included designers Manuel Miranda, Nikki Chung, and Phillip Niemeyer, and organizations such as the Center for NYC Neighborhoods, the Participatory Budgeting Project, and MinKwon Center for Community Action. Learn more here.

Youth Education

CUP partners with schools and afterschool programs to produce experiential, project-based curricula that get students out of the classroom to interact with New York City and the people who make it work. Our education programs vary in length from one day to one semester and reach over 500 students each year – from the Bronx to South Brooklyn and everywhere in between.

CUP’s Urban Investigation projects ask basic questions about how the city works and answer them over the course of a semester. Where does our garbage go? Where does our water come from? Who built public housing? Students make site visits and conduct interviews while working with Teaching Artists and CUP staff to produce award-winning videos, exhibitions, magazines, and other media that communicate what they’ve learned to a wide audience. These products are screened in theaters, exhibited at museums, and used by advocacy organizations to educate others. Learn more here.

For example, the Sewer in a Suitcase, a working model of a city streetscape and combined sewer system developed by CUP with students from City-as-School, has been featured on Design Observer, and is currently being used by educators at organizations like the Harbor School, the Lower East Side Ecology Center, and the Trust for Public Land to teach people about wastewater management and combined sewer overflow.

City Studies projects are in-class and afterschool, project-based curricula for high school students, from single-session workshops to 10-session projects. For example, in Soda Census, CUP developed a curriculum with a teacher at the Academy of Urban Planning in Bushwick to help students understand how to use information graphics in their persuasive writing. After conducting an on-the-street survey on a proposed soft drink tax, students created their own figures, charts, and graphs to help them develop arguments for or against the tax. Learn more here.

We also provide Teacher Trainings, professional development workshops for teachers and administrators that help educators connect students to their communities through art and design. We develop custom programs to meet the needs of a particular group, from a two-hour site assessment project to a week-long set of workshops. Learn more here.

All of CUP’s projects use design and art to improve civic engagement. Here are some other things you’ll find in all of our work:

Unique and unexpected collaborations. CUP is committed to bringing individuals from different fields together in creative dialogue. All CUP projects include CUP staff, artists or designers, community-based or advocacy organizations, and the people directly affected by the issues we address. CUP projects increase the capacity of our partners to advocate for social change, both through the products we create together and through our participatory design practices.

Visual communication. Every CUP project results in a piece of visual communication. CUP works with artists and designers to create everything from documentaries to posters to comic books to contraptions, all with a strong visual presence and a focus on making information accessible, enjoyable, and meaningful. CUP projects have been featured in art museums, design magazines, film festivals, and other venues, including the Venice Biennale and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s Design Triennial; publications like Print, Good, and The New York Times; and venues from Exit Art to the New Museum for Contemporary Art.

Products that are useful in the real world. CUP projects produce visual tools designed to be used by constituencies that can most benefit from the information. These audiences include community organizations, who use the products in their own organizing efforts; educators, who use the products in their classrooms; and other constituencies addressed in particular projects, such as New York City street vendors or residents of public housing.

A focus on social justice. While CUP aims to foster greater and better civic participation across the board, our projects emphasize engagement of historically underrepresented communities. Our youth education programs are all based within the New York City public school system, and our community education programs help communities access the information they need to effectively advocate for themselves and participate in decision-making that impacts their lives.

Fun and funny. CUP is serious about civic engagement, but we think it works better when it’s fun. We find these topics inherently interesting but we know they can often be intimidating. We think it’s easier for people to engage with projects that capture their imaginations, make them laugh, or give them a chance to play.

CUP projects work through a hub and spoke model that places our staff at the center of a large network of collaborators from numerous disciplines. Our staff run the organization from day to day and initiate and manage our projects. The spokes are individual project teams, made up of artists, designers, educators, activists, and researchers, who collaborate on the individual projects.

CUP was founded in 1997 by Damon Rich with co-founders Jason Anderson, AJ Blandford, Josh Breitbart, Stella Bugbee, Sarah Dadush, Althea Wasow, and Rosten Woo, who drew on their backgrounds in art, architecture, history, public policy and political theory, and graphic design to collaborate on projects investigating how the city works. They made publications, videos, and exhibits on topics like urban renewal, housing subsidies, and the history of public housing. Over time, they brought more and more collaborators, from more varied backgrounds, into their projects.

In 2001, CUP organized Building Codes, an exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture on the 100th anniversary of New York City’s Tenement House Act that used multiple methods to investigate and represent the politics of urban development. The next year, CUP conducted its first Urban Investigation project, Garbage Problems, where CUP collaborated with students to look into waste management and then create posters, models, and a video about what we learned.

In 2002, CUP received its 501(c)(3) status, and Damon Rich and Rosten Woo became its first full-time staff in 2004.

That same year, CUP began to develop some of the partnerships that have become core to our practices. That year, CUP began to hire project-based teaching artists, expanding our circle of collaborators and spreading our impact. That year, CUP also partnered with a community-based organization for the first time, Public Housing Residents of the Lower East Side (PHROLES), to create Public Housing Television, a visual tool for popular education and organizing for residents of public housing in New York City. This was one of CUP’s first Technical Assistance projects.

CUP began to create more structured collaborative frameworks for advocacy organizations, designers, and CUP staff in 2007 with the introduction of Making Policy Public.

Over the years, CUP has worked to take the core methods developed in projects like the Building Codes exhibit—stakeholder interviews; collaborations with students, organizers, advocates, educators, and visual artists; and the use of visuals to break down and communicate complex policy and planning issues — and developed a series of programs that meet specific community needs. Though we don’t make exhibits any more, we continue to use print, video, and other media to create visually-based projects that help communities all over New York City (and beyond) to understand and be a part of the decision-making that shapes their communities.